[HN Gopher] I deleted all of my email filters
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I deleted all of my email filters
Author : cdme
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-01-14 18:04 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (coryd.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (coryd.dev)
| grajaganDev wrote:
| I think this is a good choice.
|
| Search don't sort.
| zoezoezoezoe wrote:
| yes, this is exactly what I do. My email should be practically
| empty unless something is on fire.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I've forgotten when, but it has been a while; I've been with just
| "Unread" and "Flagged," which are built-in filters of Apple Mail.
| The "Flagged" ones are the ones I focus on, while the "Unread" is
| done, forgotten, or "Flagged."
|
| Whichever you use, invest time in learning the shortcuts, and
| things go pretty smoothly. My mail client is, thus, pretty clean
| most of the time.
|
| https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...
| skydhash wrote:
| I use notmuch and emacs on my main workstation and I have three
| saved searches only: inbox, unread, and archive. inbox is for
| when I need an already read mail, and archive is where
| everything goes when I've finished with them in the short term
| (I don't delete mails). If I need something, I can always do a
| more advanced search.
| mlangenberg wrote:
| In Gmail, I try to archive or delete everything that I'm done
| with, but it's difficult to keep up with many notifications
| flowing in, which I don't delete immediately or are relevant
| for the next few days and I never get back to. It's easy to get
| behind.
|
| I'll try your approach of setting up a default section for
| 'is:starred OR is:unread' and stop bothering with the archive
| step.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| If you look at it, everything is eventually archived. You
| have to stop looking at it; hence the `is:starred OR
| is:unread`.
|
| I don't delete emails except for ephemeral transactional
| emails. I still have emails from the early 2000s and have
| surprised people by replying from then or continuing a
| conversation, reminding them that we talked way back in time.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I also have no filters. But I don't use Gmail tabbed inbox,
| either. Do people know you can disable this? I ask because
| "forfeiting agency to their algorithm" doesn't make sense to me.
| It sounds like the author isn't familiar with the product.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| Turning off tabbed inbox was huge in helping me get down to
| zero emails. It got me back to one stream of data to watch and
| manage. Something comes in, I see it and process it. It also
| made the number of unread easier to reason about.
|
| I do use filters now, but haven't always because I was always
| looking for a "move to label" option in the "Create Filter"
| dialog. Instead, Gmail calls that "Archive," which I assumed
| sent it to the Negative Zone of some special compressed
| archive. I'm an idiot, for years I just assumed Google didn't
| build a move feature into it's filters.
|
| [That said, I do find Gmail (and other Google UIs) to be full
| of little points of frustration like this. Maybe others have
| had better luck with it, but Tabbed Inbox almost feels like
| it's designed to make me ineffective.]
| jeffbee wrote:
| I said the same thing when they launched it. It was a poor
| man's copy of the much better concept of "bundles" from the
| Inbox product. Bundles made it easier to cope with your email
| by only surfacing those categories once per day. Tabbed
| inboxes makes it harder by putting a notification badge in
| your face all the time.
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| Ah. I never had Inbox, so now it makes some sense to me (at
| least from a historical perspective.)
| superkuh wrote:
| No more of your filters. But your mail host is still filtering
| out things and deciding which emails you will see and which you
| will not. Even freedom loving Proton mail does it. Gmail and
| MSOffice365 are terrible about silently dropping legitimate
| emails.
|
| It's not easy to set up but a personal mailserver is the only way
| to know you'll actually receive mail people send you. Getting
| other mailservers to accept your mail is different and harder
| problem, of course.
| jeffbee wrote:
| To my knowledge Gmail never "silently drops" anything. Every
| message is either delivered, rejected with the appropriate SMTP
| failure codes, or bounced with a non-delivery report in case of
| technical failure to promptly deliver.
| superkuh wrote:
| During the Solarwinds event I saw them silently drop emails.
| During normal times they simple accept the mail and refuse to
| show it to the user (marking it "spam" and hiding it in non-
| inbox folders); a "shadow drop". Far worse than doing what is
| expected (if it really were spam, which it usually isn't)
| which is to refuse the email following standard protocols.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Which "they" are we talking about? Microsoft for sure drops
| emails silently without delivering them.
| superkuh wrote:
| Google's GMail (re: shadow drops). But re: silent drops I
| am specifically referring to Google's Gmail platform as
| was providing email hosting service for all noaa.gov
| email addresses and the silent dropping of emails sent to
| noaa.gov.
| smitelli wrote:
| > I unsubscribe to everything I do not absolutely need.
|
| This right here is one of the greatest quality-of-life
| improvements I ever adopted. Every single email you get, if you
| don't absolutely want it, find and click the unsubscribe link in
| the footer.
|
| (Standard disclaimer, don't click links in spam. Only do this for
| senders who got your address through some kind of legitimate
| purchase or account sign-up.)
|
| Each time you buy something, and they send you that first "hey
| why not buy something else too?" message, unsubscribe. It takes a
| bit of discipline, but it pays dividends.
|
| It is possible to get to a point where you hardly receive any
| mail. You can get to inbox zero doing this. It's genuinely
| refreshing.
|
| Sometimes I catch a glimpse of other people's inboxes and, my
| god, I can't imagine going back to that life.
| warner25 wrote:
| Agreed on all points.
|
| A step further, which I haven't personally tried but I've been
| thinking about, is to set up a filter rule that just
| automatically deletes anything with "unsubscribe" or "manage
| your preferences" in it. If you're already at a zero inbox and
| getting very few emails per day, this just isn't necessary, but
| I'd recommend it for someone who has a dumpster fire of an
| inbox that's getting hundreds of marketing or automatic
| notification emails per day.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| Absolutely. That's been my MO for years. Inbox zero across
| multiple different emails. It makes things really easy
| tczMUFlmoNk wrote:
| I do something similar, but: if I buy something and get a "why
| not buy something else?" email, I don't just unsubscribe; I
| mark it as spam. I am careful to never opt in to messages like
| that, so if I am receiving them then they are my address beyond
| the consent that I provided, so I _want_ Gmail to downrank
| their trust.
|
| I agree that either of these approaches pays dividends. I feel
| great about it.
| exe34 wrote:
| I do this too - if you're sending me unsolicited emails, and
| you're not specifically a human reaching out for a genuine
| human relationship free of me paying you, then your email is
| spam.
| sshine wrote:
| I have 4 filters:
|
| 1) I have a 10% membership discount to the local pet store.
| They have a weekly newsletter that I really don't care about. I
| once tried unsubscribe, and their dumb system deleted my
| account. So now I mark as read + archive their newsletter. It's
| the cost of cheap pet food.
|
| 2) I get some spam emails with recurring themes that my spam
| filter somehow fails to learn after dozens of manual
| labellings. So I've made filters to mark those as spam.
|
| 3) I set up DKIM for my domain, but I really don't care. So all
| my DKIM reports end up in a subdirectory I never look at.
|
| 4) I forward deductible receipts to receipts@mydomain so that I
| can send myself emails for later when I do accounting. I don't
| need to check this inbox regularly, because I'm the only one
| using it. It's a bit crude, but I have certain accounts in
| certain stores that won't let me change my email address (who
| seriously still uses email address as primary key?) so I
| forward those emails automatically to my receipts@ email.
|
| Other than that, my inbox is for PERSONAL EMAIL. I LOVE when I
| get letters! They're either genuinely interesting, or they
| contain an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. The only
| newsletters I've enjoyed for more than a few months is Haskell
| Weekly and This Week in Rust. I don't always read them, but
| they're sort of my "membership magazines".
| accoil wrote:
| re 3: are you talking about DMARC reports? I was under the
| impression those were opt in by adding rua=mailto:<email
| address> in the DNS record. If you remove that you should not
| be getting them.
| endofreach wrote:
| If you send me an unwanted newsletter or marketing-email,
| you'll receive multiple AI generated fake support tickets from
| various email addresses, every couple of days.
| HelenePhisher wrote:
| I want that! How does it work? Did you automate that?
| 10729287 wrote:
| My main rule is moving any email containing << unsubscribe >>
| in /newsletter. Life changing.
| warner25 wrote:
| Don't use filter rules to _sort_ mail; after unsubscribing from
| everything you possibly can, use filter rules to _even more
| aggressively auto-delete or block stuff_ that you really don 't
| need to see.
|
| You should end up getting so few emails that it's easy to read
| them all in one inbox or folder and subsequently reply, take a
| note, and manually delete them to get back to zero.
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Well that only works for personal email unfortunately. In a
| corporate environment you often don't have an ability to
| unsubscribe from unwanted mail like those mandatory trainings or
| production alerts
| warner25 wrote:
| _This_ is what filter rules are for. See my other comment.
| throeurir wrote:
| > I unsubscribe to everything I do not absolutely need
|
| I get like 500 daily messages between multiple email accounts,
| and this just does not scale. Some messages are needed once year,
| monthly, some weekly, some are fed into LLM and automation. It is
| very convenient to have everything organized into folders.
|
| I really have no time, to look for some esoteric details, in some
| obscure report, on website that stopped working 5 years ago! I
| just use full text search over my local email archive!
|
| It also keeps paper trail. If GitHub goes down, or I get fired, I
| still have most comments and decisions.
|
| Without email I would start reinventing alternatives like RSS.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| How many emails do you think you could have unsubscribed from
| while typing your reply? You're going to check your email daily
| for years to come. Why not cull a few every now and then?
|
| > It also keeps paper trail. If GitHub goes down, or I get
| fired, I still have most comments and decisions.
|
| You obviously keep/archive the important things...
| throeurir wrote:
| I actually have to make money. Deleting everything is a bit
| nihilistic.
|
| And I am not going to unsubscribe from daily status reports
| on my servers. Those are not "absolutely needed", but it is
| better to have them locally in my email. Landing all incoming
| emails into inbox just does not scale!
| tennisflyi wrote:
| I was getting at culling surplus/extraneous things you had
| subscribed to, but if all 500 emails are needed, you do you
| (and make that money with a heavy cognitive load!)
| throeurir wrote:
| But it is not heavy cognitive load. Thanks to filters and
| automation...
|
| I get like 20 emails daily that get through filters, land
| in my inbox and need my urgent attention. I can not
| imagine being directly exposed to unfiltered stream of
| junk, and trying to fish out emails from my boss.
| ergonaught wrote:
| This. I receive several hundred non-junk emails every day. I
| don't need to read all of them at the time, but I do need to
| receive them. Many of them lend themselves to some form of
| segmentation.
|
| No idea how I'd realistically manage it without
| rules/folders/etc. Even when I try "one inbox, just use search"
| that inevitably results in saved searches, which is,
| practically speaking, the same as rules/folders/etc.
| afcool83 wrote:
| At some point email went from a true communication avenue to just
| "sending this for reference". Apps and services are adding their
| own notification inboxes and comment threads (or activity logs)
| and @-mentions as an interaction pattern so that they can enrich
| and embed communication in the context of what they do.
|
| I won't go so far as to say that email is dying, but it's
| certainly changing in purpose.
| warner25 wrote:
| As someone who enjoys corresponding with old friends and
| distant family via email (as opposed to, like, text messages or
| social media comments), I feel like this trend has ruined my
| ability to do so. It seems like people - who've given up and
| let their inboxes become flooded - just don't even look in
| their inboxes for legitimate, personal correspondence anymore.
| funOtter wrote:
| > It seems like people ... just don't even look in their
| inboxes for legitimate, personal correspondence anymore
|
| I disagree with that - in my experience sending persona
| correspondence to my friends/family are generally received
| and read.
|
| It does seem like people really want the "like (with an
| emoji)" funcitonality of the rest of the web in email ...
| Gmail and Outlook are building it in, but unless you're in
| their walled gardens it does not work great (i.e. email
| reply: "X has ed your message")
| butz wrote:
| There is a category of spam emails where clicking unsubscribe
| links ends up signaling spammers that email address is in use and
| leads to even more spam emails. I wish there was an option to
| really block such emails and not put them in spam or trash
| folders. Going even further, each spam email sender should be
| forced to make a small payment to get their spam delivered to my
| inbox.
| kotaKat wrote:
| No, you gotta keep at least the X-Phishtest filter (or whatever
| vendor your company uses for stupid phishtests), at a minimum.
| willswire wrote:
| This is the way.
|
| Search basically nullifies the need to organize/group messages in
| subfolders. I practice similar email hygiene as the author;
| everything goes through the mental flow chart:
|
| Does this need to be worked? Keep in Inbox. Otherwise...
|
| Does this need to be saved? Archive.
|
| Else? Unsubscribe and/or Delete
| narag wrote:
| Most email strategies I read about, assume some premises that
| don't apply to me:
|
| - Web mail
|
| - IMAP
|
| - Phone
|
| In this case, trying to apply TFA to my job is also impossible,
| since the article implies that I can unsubscribe from the dozens
| of notifications someone thought it was a good idea to CC the
| whole department. Thanks God for filters!
|
| At home I do filter too, sometimes I've found useful stuff in 20
| y.o. messages. Of course, YMMV.
| neilv wrote:
| I recently decided to keep my email filters, because they're
| still working for me.
|
| On my personal laptop, which folder of mine an incoming email
| lands in:
|
| * Trash -- All those "new device" emails that sites have started
| sending every time I log in from the same IP address as always,
| because I don't preserve their cookies (congrats, you've made
| security worse), plus Fedex (who won't let me unubscribe from
| marketing emails). I might look at this every few weeks, briefly.
|
| * Junk -- Detected spam by my email hoster, _plus_ emails from
| people not in my addressbook (with a few exclusions, such as for
| certain domains). I have to check this folder every couple days,
| briefly.
|
| * Lower -- Emails matching large list of rules for
| senders/subjects I know I don't see soon as they arrive, but will
| check this folder at least once a day.
|
| * Inbox -- Everything remaining after the rules applied, which is
| generally emails from people I know, and things I know I want to
| see promptly, and new unknown stuff from addresses in my
| addressbook (of 11K entries). This is the only folder that
| triggers any kind of notification to me, and it's a fairly low-
| disruption notification.
|
| That's for personal. My work email setups vary by
| employer/client, but I always get notifications of emails by
| default from anyone in the company, partners, customers, etc., so
| I can be responsive. Then slowly add rules to exclude
| notifications from those of employer/client/partner/customer
| things that you know don't need prompt attention (like a noisy
| SaaS announcing every change in a high-traffic repo or wiki).
| reader9274 wrote:
| I agree with the article 100%. There are still emails you can't
| unsubscribe from and shouldn't report as spam or block, for
| example your monthly bank statement email. It's sad that you
| can't turn these off as the bank is required to send them. For
| these cases I do set a "send to trash" rule. If using iCloud,
| note that rules you set locally on your Mac only run if the Mac
| is on. To have them run on the server they need to be set on
| iCloud Mail online, which gives a very limited way to set rules
| but just barely good enough for these rare occasions.
| Ringz wrote:
| Since I started using imapfilter [1] on my server and
| ,,aggressive unsubscribe", email is good again. I added a
| shortcut to my aerc configuration [2] which adds the sender of a
| selected mail to a file which imapfilter reads to move it in a
| folder. It's so convenient now it can handle hundreds of mails
| over several mail accounts fully automated.
|
| 1: https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter
|
| 2: https://github.com/rafo/aerc-vim
| alexwasserman wrote:
| A friend taught me to create a Smart Folder in Mail to show
| messages in inbox that contain the string "unsubscribe".
|
| Then you unsubscribe.
|
| I try to keep inbox zero, so it flags all new email that needs
| unsubscribing. It's a very helpful trick.
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(page generated 2025-01-18 23:01 UTC)